They progressed slowly, past Hampton and Staines and Windsor and Maidenhead, stopping whenever they found a spot they liked and staying there for as long as they liked and then going on again. By the time they had been gone a night and a day London and its dying thousands seemed to be in another world, almost another age. Amber began to improve more rapidly, and she was as determined as Bruce to shut those memories from her mind. When they tried to creep in she pushed them aside, refusing to meet them face to face.
I’ll forget there ever was a plague, she insisted.
And gradually it began to seem that Bruce’s sickness and her own, all the events of the past three months had not happened recently but many years ago, in another life. It even seemed they must have happened to other people, not to them. She wondered if he felt the same way, but she never asked, for it was a subject they refused to discuss.
For a while Amber was desolate over her appearance. She was afraid that her beauty was gone forever and that she would be ugly the rest of her life. In spite of everything Bruce could say to try to reassure her she cried with rage and despair every time she saw a mirror.
“Oh, my God!” she would wail dismally. “I’d rather be dead than look like this! Oh, Bruce—I’m never going to look like I did before, I know I’m not! Oh! I hate myself!”
He would put his arms about her, smiling as though she were a naughty child, coaxing away her fear and anguish. “Of course you’re going to look the same, darling. But good Lord, you were mighty sick you know—you can’t expect to be well again in only a few days.” They had not been long on the yacht when her health improved so much that she did begin to look something like her old self.
Both of them realized, as perhaps they never had before, how pleasant it was merely to be alive. They spent hours lying stretched out on cushions on the deck, soaking in hot sunlight, that seemed to penetrate to the very bone—and though Bruce lay naked, his body turning a deep rich brown again, Amber kept herself carefully covered for fear of tanning her own cream-coloured skin. They shared everything, so as to enjoy it more intensely: The late summer sky, clear and blue, painted only here and there with a thin spray of cloud. The sound of a corncrake on a dewy morning. The good smell of earth and warm summer rain. The silver-green leaves of a poplar growing just beside a shallow stream. A little girl, standing amid white daisies, surrounded by her flock of geese.
Later on they began to go into the villages to buy provisions or sometimes to eat a ready-cooked meal, which now seemed a rare luxury and almost an adventure. Amber worried a great deal about Nan and little Susanna, particularly after she found that there was plague in the country, too, but Bruce insisted that she must make herself believe that they were well and safe.
“Nan’s a woman of good sense, and there’s no one more loyal. If it became dangerous where they were she’d go somewhere else. Trust her, Amber, and don’t make yourself miserable worrying.”
“Oh, I do trust her!” she would say. “But I can’t
Everything that Amber saw now reminded her of Marygreen and her life there with Aunt Sarah and Uncle Matt. It was rich agricultural country, as was Essex, with prosperous enclosed farms, many orchards, quiet pretty little villages usually no more than two or three miles apart—though often, as she knew, so far as those who lived there were concerned it might as well have been two or three hundred miles. There were cottages of cherry brick with oak frames and thatched roofs that lay like thick blankets over them. Morning-glories and roses climbed the walls and clustered about the dormer windows. Pearl-grey doves perched softly cooing on the steep-slanted roof-tops, and sparrows ruffled themselves in the dusty roadway. It seemed to her now to mean peace and quiet and a kind of contentment which must exist nowhere else on earth.
She tried to tell him something of how she felt and added, “I never used to feel that way about it when I lived there—yet God knows I don’t want to go back!”
He smiled at her tenderly. “You’re growing older, darling.”
Amber. looked at him with surprise and resentment. “Old! Marry come up! I’m not so old! I’m not twenty-two yet!” Women began to feel self-conscious about age as soon as they reached twenty.
He laughed. “I didn’t mean that you’re growing old. Only that you’re enough older you’ve begun to have memories—and memories are always a little sad.”
She digested that thoughtfully, and gave a light sigh. It was just at gloaming and they were walking back to the Sapphire through a low lush river meadow. Nearby they could hear the castanet-like voice of a frog, and the stag-beetles buzzing noisily.
